


Rubrum

by Tawus



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Angst, Arthritis, Blood, Blood Drinking, Captivity, F/M, Friendship, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Hypnosis, Love Triangles, Murder, Period Piece, Plot, Raids, Rebellion, Rivalry, Sickly Reader, Slow Burn, Stockholm Syndrome, Survival, Swordfighting, Vampires, aristocratic life, castle - Freeform, enslavement, revolutions, vampires VS humans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-14
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:35:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27556966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawus/pseuds/Tawus
Summary: Hyunjin is a vampire prince in the 18th century. You become His Highness’s human captive. You are forced to live in his castle as his favourite pet and obey his every whim if you want to live.
Relationships: Hwang Hyunjin/Original Female Character(s), Hwang Hyunjin/Reader, Hwang Hyunjin/You, Lee Felix/Original Female Character(s), Lee Felix/Reader, Lee Felix/You
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28





	Rubrum

“Come on, Maria! We will be late, they’re already lighting the torches!”

“Wait, (y/n)! This flower isn’t staying up in my hair! Help?” your beautiful golden-haired friend turned to you with pleading eyes. You sighed and hurried to her side to secure the flower for her.

Today was a wedding celebration and the whole village was invited to eat, drink and dance the night away. Two young people – a beautiful innocent bride and a shy but affable young groom – were about to be joined in holy matrimony. Festivities such as these were rare in your small remote village since it was dangerous to be so merry as to throw caution to the wind and so frivolous as to waste food reserves. After all, the village was inhabited by humans – which were the few relic remnants of what was once the ruling species in these lands. It weren’t humans that reigned supreme in this vast country now – it was the vampires.

By God’s grace, none of the inhabitants of the lone village have personally met a vampire. It is understood by everyone that if a person meets a vampire, he or she wouldn’t live to tell the tale. The rumours say that vampires are built like humans but that they are incomparable to humans in their beauty, as well as, strength. Their skin is said to be milk-white and it is said to glow like freshly fallen snow at sunrise. Their eyes are rumoured to be iridescent and if a human stared too long into them, they would get bewitched and lose control of their mind and body. Every child grew up hearing the tale of the sylphlike female vampire who once enchanted the army of men who had come to hunt her down, and they walked like puppets towards her and impaled themselves on her claw-like nails, all the while staring into her ethereal doll-like eyes.

Vampires are said to speak like humans, dress like humans, engage in similar pastimes as human nobility and, by some accounts, they can even eat the food that humans eat – although human food does not satiate them – but they are fundamentally different from humans. After all, vampires are predators and what they hunt _is_ humans.

And so for most of the time, the villagers led a quiet and cautious life – not making too much noise and not burning too much firewood for the fear of being spotted by any vampires that might be prowling nearby. The lands of this country are known to be the property of the Vampire King, who lived far away in his enormous castle that was built into a black rocky mountain. And so the village was set up as far away from his castle as possible – at the very edge of the country, where vampires didn’t venture out as much.

On a rare occasion, such as tonight’s wedding, the hitherto vigilant folk of the village would gather together to relax for a little while and forget for just one night that they are animals to be hunted. You and your close friend Maria would be considered unmarried innocent flowers who had yet to find their mate – a task that Maria was diligent about, although you were not. You were quite happy to remain unmarried and help Maria look her best and attract herself a perfect husband.

“All done! You look like a princess now!” you stepped back and assessed your work of braiding flowers into Maria’s beautiful flaxen hair.

She picked up a handheld mirror and admired herself in it. “Like a vampire princess?” she winked at you.

“Shhh! You don’t want the elders to hear you say that!” you admonished.

“I know, I know,” she giggled. “Are you sure you don’t want me to braid some of these petals into your hair? You would look so pretty! All the boys would notice you,” she whispered the last part.

You chuckled. “No, that’s alright. I’m fine this way.”

Maria shrugged and donned her beautiful handmade shawl over her burgundy dress. It was the one she wore on special occasions such as tonight. Your dress was clean but that’s all it was – clean. In terms of colours or novelty, it was a dull dress with a grey laced-up bodice. At best, it showed off your delicate waistline but it didn’t make you the Belle of the Ball by any means.

The two of you rushed hand-in-hand to the place of celebration and, sure enough, the whole village had arrived ahead of you. Maria’s eyes were already searching for her love interest: the pale and devious boy named Louis, who was several years older than her.

Having been friends with her for many years, you’ve become closely acquainted with her obsession with tall, pale, raffish boys. In a public place like this, she had no chance of openly approaching Louis but you knew that come moonlight, she would be exchanging your company for his. Until then, though, Maria dragged you to the centre of the gathering to dance with the other girls.

The night was indeed merry and the elders even procured barrels of wine, so the adult populace danced and sung. You threw glances at the bride and groom who sat shyly at the biggest table and were seemingly happy to just be together.

The festive night stretched well into midnight but you couldn’t keep up with the other girls dancing around the fire. Your joints were rattling and the chilly night air was making them ache. According to the village doctor, you had a joint disease and it was incurable. You thought back to the 2 years prior to this night when you had your first joint pain in your knees, before it spread to other joints as well: hips, ankles, shoulders, elbows, wrists and fingers.

You stepped out of the festive camp into the chilly night air to take a breath. You pulled your hands from below your apron and eyed your hands under the moonlight. It wasn’t yet noticeable to anyone else but you could see the early signs of joint deformity in your fingers. You wondered how many years it would be before your whole body succumbed to deformity. You glanced back at the hubbub of laughter and singing, and your heart constricted at the sight of your girl friends dancing happily. You felt jealous of their health and vitality. What you wouldn’t do to have a healthy body like theirs…

You realised where your thoughts were headed and you quickly shut them out. Jealousy wouldn’t do you any good. After all, you _deserved_ your disease…

Your thoughts were interrupted by the tremor you were beginning to feel under your feet. The tremor was rhythmic and it was growing in intensity… It was the sound of hooves!

You ran out to the makeshift road leading to the secluded village and, to your alarm, you spotted a group of riders approaching the village. It could have been any riders, even travellers passing by, but something looked terribly off about them. It took you a split second to realise what it was: they carried no torches even though it was pitch black out here in the countryside. That meant that these riders could see at night. Vampires.

You turned around in order to run back to the celebration and warn the villagers but before you could even make two steps, the horsemen caught up with you and you felt a sharp pain in the back of your head. Someone had hit you. Your vision went dark and your body collapsed to the ground with a thud. The last thing you heard before you lost consciousness was the sound of hooves bypassing you and the screams of your fellow villagers in the distance, as the vampire riders laid waste to all that you’ve come to love.

You opened your eyes some hours later and, at first, you couldn’t discern where you were and what had happened. Your eyelids were heavy and it was hard to focus your eyesight. It still seemed dark but the sky was beginning to change shades. That meant it was almost dawn. You found yourself lying on the ground on top of some straw. You winced from the sharp pain in the back of your head, which made itself apparent as soon as you started coming to your senses. You reached your hand to the back of your head and gasped to see your fingers coated in dried blood. That was when you remembered what had happened: the village was attacked.

You pushed yourself off the ground so you could go and check on others but then your eyes fell on the pool of blood that had gathered beside you. You breathing hitched as you followed the pool of blood with your eyes to its origin. You couldn’t contain your scream when you saw the corpse of the bride laying a few steps from you.

She looked different – pale, gaunt and…dried up, like a plump tomato dried up in the sun. Her lifeless eyes were wide open and staring at you. In her final moments, she must have been looking to you for help while you lay just steps away from her, unconscious and useless.

“She was delicious,” you heard a velvet voice in the distance and next to your ear at the same time. The voice confused your senses. You snapped your head towards the source of the voice and saw a tall middle-aged man leaning against the open doors. It was only now that your mind had placed your location to be the inside of the village barn.

“That should’ve been you too,” the same man said with a smile and nodded towards the bride’s dead body. You looked at her again, feeling yourself starting to hyperventilate.

The man moved from his static pose by the doorframe and started walking towards you, making you instinctively retreat to the back wall of the barn. The dawn light illuminated the man and your eyes rapidly absorbed his unusual appearance. He appeared to be in his late thirties, yet his face bore not a single wrinkle. His hair was long and black like tar, draping down towards his chest in neat waves. He was tall and clad in aristocratic clothing – intricate armour along with a black cape covering one shoulder and half of his chest. Most apparent, though, was his milky skin standing out against the backdrop of the dark countryside, and his eyes that were glowing like two fireflies.

You moved away until you were completely backed into the wall yet the vampire didn’t stop advancing on you. His leather boots kept tapping the wooden floor until they came to a stop right in front of you. The vampire crouched down, still eyeing you with his burning ember eyes. You hugged your knees to your chest in an instinctive attempt to make yourself as small as possible, as if that would help you disappear. You kept your eyes somewhat down, not wanting to look directly into the vampire’s eyes, lest he wanted to put any spell on you, but you could feel his own eyes burning into you.

There was silence for a few moments. The raven-haired vampire did nothing but observe you. But then he leaned forward and you heard him take an inhale of the air around you.

“I smell something… _defective_ ,” he said in the same velvet voice, which resonated by your ears even though the vampire was a step away from you. Your eyes widened in shock at his words.

You looked up at him and saw that he was grinning. You stared at him wide-eyed. Could he read your thoughts? Did he know you? Does he know about…

“But you’re lucky to have been born beautiful,” the vampire said more gently this time and stood up. “You’re just His Highness’s type. I’m sure he would want to drain you himself.”

 _Drain?_ You looked back at the corpse of the poor bride on the floor and your body began to shiver.

Just as the sun started blessing the country with its first rays, the captive villagers who were deemed strong enough to walk back to the vampire castle were put in a procession. The ones deemed too feeble and not worth taking back were killed instantly and their blood was drunk. Tired, dirty and cold, with dried blood still staining the back of your head, you joined the procession of newly acquired captives through the muddy roads. It seemed that the murders of the poor bride and groom were carried out on a whim, since they could have walked to the castle as well, but it may have been a twisted kind of fun to cut down two young people just before they embarked on their happy journey of love.

Based on some legends, the villagers had hoped that with the appearance of sun rays, the vampires would scatter as the sun was thought to be harmful to their pale skin. But to everyone’s despair, some of them simply covered their heads with the hoods of their black capes, while others paid the sun no mind at all. It was a hopeless situation and the villagers hung their heads in defeat as they walked towards certain death. All of your fates were set in stone: walk unknown distances to the lair of the vampires, only to then be killed and drained of all your blood. In the eyes of these predators, all of you, humans, were simply livestock.

As you walked through the mud with the others, you tried to find your loved ones in the procession. Your adoptive parents – were they here? Were they alive? Or did they get murdered because they were deemed to not be worth dragging all the way to the vampires’ castle? You felt nausea wash over you at the thought of your adoptive parents being dead in a ditch somewhere. You hadn’t had the most heartfelt parent-child relationship with them but you respected them and felt thankful to them for taking you into their home. To your dismay, you couldn’t spot them anywhere in the procession.

You also looked for Maria. You couldn’t let anything happen to her. It was your duty to watch over her, even if it meant giving your life for hers. You searched for the burgundy coloured dress she had been wearing the night before but you couldn’t spot her anywhere.

Things couldn’t get any worse. You hung your head in despair just like all the other people in the procession. The mud had coated your shoes entirely. Unsticking and lifting your feet from the ground was becoming a struggle with each laboured step. What made it worse was that the mud was cold and your joints, which had been acting up since last night, were screaming in pain by now. The stress of last night and this morning’s events had drained you of all strength and the burning type of pain was searing through all of your joints. But you couldn’t let the vampires know that. If they knew you had such a disease, they might deem you useless for their purposes and kill you immediately. You had to play the role of a decent-quality livestock. So you bit your lip and powered through, while the pain in several parts of your body gradually turned into agony.

The sun had already been shining from atop the horizon and illuminating the whole land, but it did little to bring warmth to you or your fellow captives. The vampires were all clad in exquisite black armour and black capes, riding on horses that were just as beautiful and monstrous as them. It had taken you some time to realise that their horses were vampires too. You couldn’t believe your eyes, how was that possible? The beasts looked predatory – not like any horses you have ever seen – their hungry eyes were glowing and their stamina seemed incessant.

The vampire riders weren’t many in number but they were flanking the human procession methodically and at close intervals. Their eyes roamed over all of you so you had to try extra hard to keep walking as if nothing was wrong with you. It was becoming all the more difficult to not contort your face in pain and to keep your breathing even. You didn’t know how much farther you could walk in this state. The mud kept grasping you by the feet and pulling you into itself. You tried sticking your head out from the procession to see if you were any closer to your destination but there was nothing in sight but plain fields and valleys. You realised you were exactly in the middle of the procession – the same line of desolate-looking prisoners that was stretching in front of you, was also stretching behind you. At the head of the line, you spotted the raven-haired vampire that had spoken to you in the barn. He seemed to be the commander of this operation.

To keep your mind occupied, you attempted to take careful glances at all the other vampires flanking the procession. They were all just as beautiful and ethereal like the black-haired vampire. The skin of each was like shimmering glass, their statures were proud and perversely elegant, and their raptorial eyes were glowing softly. But what was that beauty worth if it’s sustained with the blood of innocent people?

You almost cried out when your foot stepped onto a sharp stone that had been sitting deep within the mud. The stone sent just the right amount of impact through all the joints of your right leg and you couldn’t hold yourself up anymore. You collapsed into the mud. The pain was too much to bear. You wanted to give up and just wail up at the sky but you bit your lip. You had to get up before the vampires come to you. You tried but had no strength to do so. The procession didn’t stop for you though; the villagers that had been walking behind you simply began to bypass you with indifferent faces. The poor bastards couldn’t help themselves – how could they help you?

In the distance you heard the thuds of hooves approaching fast. Oh no! They have noticed. They were coming to kill you and discard your body in these deserted lands. The hooves came to a stop nearby and you faintly heard the rider jump down from his horse.

“Your Highness, you do not need to concern yourself with these slaves!” said a voice, seemingly belonging to an older vampire. There was no response. The footsteps kept approaching you. You had to get up, now! You helplessly struggled in the mud but it wouldn’t let go of you and of your weak, painful limbs.

“Your Highness?” the same voice as before spoke again.

Your vision struggled to focus as you saw a blurry male silhouette appear above you. The man, whom you assumed to be a vampire as well, crouched down by your body and you managed to discern some of his features. His golden hair framed his heart-shaped face. His attire was black like the rest of them, yet your eyes caught the occasional glimmer of the golden details in his armour. You felt his eyes looking at you and you braced yourself for death. He must have come down here to finish you off.

“Frail cage bird,” the man’s full lips moved and you heard his voice. It was very different from all the ones you heard until now. You could have sworn that his beautiful lips were smiling at you.

In the next moment, the man leaned closer to you and took an inhale. The vampire you met at the barn this morning had done the same thing – they were both smelling you. And the raven-haired vampire had deemed you defective after having inhaled your scent. Would this vampire smell your defect too?

As if on cue, the vampire above you hummed and looked aside with a knowing smile. Before you could make sense of his reaction to your scent, you felt his arms carefully hoist you up from the ground, carry your worn out body in his arms and sit you on the saddle of his horse. Soon after, the rider himself ascended on top of the horse as well and sat right behind you. You tried your best to hold yourself up with what little strength you had but you felt the rider’s hand reach from below your underarm, settle at the base of your ribcage and press your body back against his own torso. You leaned back against the rider’s chest helplessly before he snapped the reins, thereby throwing his horse into a gallop.

“Your Highness, please! You do not need to do that. Leave it to us!” exclaimed the same voice as before but the nameless horseman, with you in his lap, was already riding away from the procession of human slaves and the other vampires.

You turned your head slightly to the side in order to try and take a look at the procession you were speeding past. Towards the front of the long line of people you spotted the burgundy colour but your vision couldn’t properly make out if it was Maria or not. Soon enough your horse galloped past the raven-haired vampire on top of his horse as well, and even in your dazed state you heard him say with a soft chuckle, “I knew she was his type.”

You turned your head back to the horizon in front of you, as the horse underneath you sped past the fields. Your head and back were still leaning against the rider’s torso and your rear was backed into his groin. You couldn’t turn to take a look at him, however you were able to look down at his hands, which were holding the reins just above your lap. His hands were fair, large and handsome. And yet his wrists were slim and somewhat delicate, like a woman’s. He had large nail plates and his fingers were long and slim with prominent interphalangeal joints. He had several rings on his elegant fingers, which were screaming opulence. On second thought, you recalled what the owner of these hands was addressed as: “Your Highness.” He must have been royalty – _vampire_ royalty. Your pulse quickened and you tensed up – what was a mere mortal human like you doing sitting in the lap of a vampire royalty? You were thrown into even deeper panic when your eyes caught the sight of your dress being raised up in an unsightly way for you to be able to sit on the horse. Half of your bare legs were showing and the hem of your dress was bunched up in your lap in a prime show of vulgarity. Peasants were killed for less by nobility.

You got flustered and tried to cover up your bare legs but your fruitless squirming only caused the vampire behind you to laugh. To your surprise, his laughter was youthful and even somewhat boyish, which made you realise he must have been a young vampire. Vibrating of his chest in tune with his laughter was transmitting to your body through your back that was leaning on him. When the young vampire was finished laughing at you, he gripped the reins tighter and said just above your ear, “Relax, cage bird. Modesty is nugatory in the realm of the dead.”


End file.
